Posted: Jul 14, 2008  11:34

Say it ain't so, Butch.

I have to tell you, Governor, that this half-cocked plan you're pushing for requiring canoeists and kayakers to pay an annual registration fee is riddled with enough holes to sink the Lusitania.

If this legislative brainstorm ramrods its way through a "non-motorized boating work group" you appointed - which sounds like a tribunal out of 'Waterworld' - river rafters in Idaho will be getting hosed.

From what I can figure out, part of your reasoning for wanting kayakers and canoeists to cough up $20 per year is because they use the same facilities as owners of motorized boats, and you want to keep the playing field fair for anyone who drops an inflatable tube in Idaho's rivers.

But good gracious, Gov, I think you've got your rudder stuck in a governmental sand bog called "I never proposed a tax I didn't like."

What's insulting about this plan - which would also make Idaho the first western state to require registration fees for non-motorized boat owners in four years - is that 99 percent of Idaho's whitewater that canoeists and kayakers like to tackle flows through federal lands. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management already charge use fees, for heaven sakes.

Obviously, Butch, these non-motorized registration fees you think are a fair shake won't help fund or improve any facility or anything else for that matter on federal lands shouldering rivers that canoeists and kayakers paddle through.

So where will these non-motorized boat registration fees go? Why, straight into the state coffers, where all good taxes find their way.

But the payoff on this "fee" is so huge it would have made both Captains Kidd and Henry Morgan reconsider careers in politics over piracy.

Currently, motorized boat registration already brings in an annual $1.6 million, while another $851,000 from boating programs dribbles in from state and federal grants. While they can only speculate, officials estimate that there are at least 100,000 kayaks and canoes in Idaho.

At $20 a pop for a required registration fee, you're looking at $2 million big ones for a state that will undoubtedly have to change the wording on its license plate from 'Famous Potatoes' to 'Famous Canoe Tax.'

We know that government has an insatiable appetite for increased revenue by nickel-and-diming businesses and the public through a dizzying array of fees. But any way you slice it, paying an annual registration on canoes and kayaks - although it might sound gentler termed as a "use fee" - is still a heavy-handed tax that simply seems wrong.

For one thing, Butch, your argument that non-motorized boaters use some of the facilities that are supported by motorboat registration fees doesn't hold water.

Try telling that assumption to canoeists and kayakers, many of whom bought their boats so they can avoid so-called nice facilities along the river in the first place, preferring instead to drag or portage their vessels through brush and over trails.

You think they stowed overnight gear, trail mix and Top Ramen so they could hobnob with a party on a 50-foot houseboat moored in Mile High Marina on Payette Lake?

Two other western states learned hard lessons when they attempted to impose the same non-motorized boat fee.

"We almost lost the boating program over it," Alaska's boating safety administrator was quoted as saying. After non-motorized boat users complained in droves, it was eventually dropped from the law. And partly because administrative costs exceeded the revenues that were being collected, Arizona also got rid of the annual registration fee.

In other words, Governor, both states ended up taking a bath from a plan that was supposed to be a cakewalk on water.

C'mon, Butch, don't make me have to run for Governor - pull the plug on this, wide-stance, waterlogged goose egg before it replaces Larry Craig jokes on YouTube.